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Who is Paul Giamatti?

New Yorker staff writer Mark Singer’s chief question for Paul Giamatti at the SVA Theatre on Sunday afternoon was a tough one: “Who are you?”

The actor, who has played real-life characters that range from President John Adams to cartoonist Harvey Pekar replied, “I’m a complete mystery to myself.” Don’t worry, Singer assured him: the same question stumped even the aggressively self-assured Donald Trump.

Perhaps to suggest an answer to the unanswerable, Singer played a clip from the film “American Splendor” in which Giamatti, as Pekar, explains to a fan over the phone what he’s “really” like. So many illustrators have taken a crack at Pekar’s likeness, that “who is Harvey Pekar?” seems, in the film, a reasonable thing to wonder.

Giamatti, who worked with the real Pekar, explained that he loves to make a study of the physicality of a character as a means of simultaneously illustrating, reproducing, and partially obscuring the real-life version of that person. As the clip rolled, the audience watched Giamatti study his own illustration of Pekar.

How did that feel?

“I do look at that and think, ‘I wish I were that actor,’” he said.

Photograph by Amy Sussman/Getty Images.

Kelly Stout has been writing humor pieces for the magazine since 2014.